Step 6: Customizing It: Umbrella Alarm

Step 7: Next Steps

Email and web data can make your projects more useful and powerful. Here are a few ideas; PHP If you have a webserver, you can use PHP to calculate...

Rudolph, the Email Reading Reindeer, lets you know when you've got a new email and tells you who sent it. Here's a demo;

Rudolph uses a Propeller Platform USB to log into the email server, trigger animations, and generate the speech. An E-Net module handles the Internet connection. First, I'll answer a few questions, then I'll show you how I built it, and I'll give you a few ideas on how to customize it for your own projects.

Step 1: FAQ

How's it work?
Rudolph regularly connects to your email server via POP, logs in, and checks the number of emails in your inbox. If you've got a new email, it triggers an animation on the stuffed animal, retrieves the name of the sender and plays it back.

A Propeller Platform USB runs everything, using an E-Net module to handle the Internet connection. The 'Text-to-Speech' engine also runs on the Propeller; It's really a text-to-phoneme engine, but works well enough to read the name of the sender.

What about reading something other than email?
Rudolph can tell you the weather, read a sports score, or blink when you get a tweet! I'll show you how to use any data that's available on a webpage in your own project.

How do I make it work with a different stuffed animal?
It should work with any stuffed animal that has a switch to start/stop animation, and a speaker to play audio. You could also take emails and display them on a TV - Rudolph isn't a requirement.

Everything is open source. I'll go through the program, but if you're impatient, here's the code.